Nicholas Murray Butler Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

Nicholas Murray Butler
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

Nicholas Murray Butler
There was a time when philosophy might have been defined as the science of human activity, so all-comprehensive was it. The ambitious Greek who would attach his name to a philosophical system must include in his scheme all that could be known, done, and speculated about God, the world, and man. In the course of time and the specialization of the sciences this view of philosophy fell away, and was replaced by the more exact and narrower conception of modern times.

Nicholas Murray Butler
Where the forms of civil, religious and political liberty still exist, they must be strengthened and given new power over the hearts as well as over the minds of men. Faith must not be lost, and courage must not be lacking. The call is for every civilized human being who believes in justice, in liberty and in public morals. The bell is ringing!

Nicholas Murray Butler
All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

Nicholas Murray Butler
Both anti-Semitism and the Ku Klux Klan are an insult to democracy and a contradiction of it. But faith honest, sincere, hopeful, opens a door to moving forward in this new and very difficult world in which our children must live. It opens the door into that world in a spirit inspired by something more than the merely human, the gain-seeking and the temporary. It brings us, our children and our grandchildren, in touch with the eternal verities which are the only possible foundation for a civilization and a life that are worthy of human ambition and human endeavor.

Nicholas Murray Butler
Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

Nicholas Murray Butler
Many definitions have been given of the word education, but underlying them all is the conception that it denotes an attempt on the part of the adult members of a human society to shape the development of the coming generation in accordance with its own ideals of life. It is true that the word has not infrequently been used in wider senses than this.

Nicholas Murray Butler
The United States is in sore need today of an aristocracy of intellect and service. Because such an aristocracy does not exist in the popular consciousness, we are bending the knee to the golden calf of money. The form of monarchy and its pomp offer a valuable foil to the worship of money for its own sake. A democracy must provide itself with a foil of its own and none is better or more effective than an aristocracy of intellect and service.

Nicholas Murray Butler
Until the family and the church can be roused to the full height of their responsibility we cannot expect to find the youth of the land in possession of that religious knowledge and religious feeling which were characteristic of their ancestors two or three generations ago.

Nicholas Murray Butler
The elements of plane geometry should precede algebra for every reason known to sound educational theory. It is more fundamental, it is more concrete, and it deals with things and their relations rather than with symbols.

Nicholas Murray Butler
The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method

Nicholas Murray Butler
The making of a few score of admirable specialists, and the annual production of a small army of youths with narrow, if minute, information useful in some particular vocation, is a sorry substitute for reaching the great mass of the population with the influence and ideals of scientific inquiry and the scientific method.

Nicholas Murray Butler
The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

Nicholas Murray Butler